Ways to stay updated with research news in linguistics

We've talked about this before, but I think it needs to be said again - get on mailing lists for linguistics if you want to be kept in the loop about things. Announcements of workshops, positions, conferences, edited volumes etc - they main information distribution channel for such news in linguistics is mailing lists. There are some other useful RSS-feeds and twitter personas that are good to keep track of as well, but do get on mailing lists first if you're keen to stay updated.

You don't have to stay updated you know, but I know that many readers of this blog are young researchers looking to start a career and for them this is useful.

There's the overall listsLINGUIST and LINGLITE that are sort of the highway of information with a broad range, and then there's the more nisched small lists.

Filter!

And for the love of Greenberg, filter 'em. Don't come back complaining about being flooded unless you've tried filtering ^^! Basically what you want to do is throw everything in the "not important", "read" or "trash" by default and then pick out emails containing certain key words for your "important", "unread" or "non-trash" folder. You don't want to filter out those not to read, you want to filter in those you do want to read.

Here are the ways of setting up filters for some of the major email clients:

You might also want to turn them off when you're on vacation or something.LINGTYP

One of the most useful for those interested in language diversity is LINGTYP. However, it is restricted to only members of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT) . You can, however, still read the archives freely you just can't submit to the list as a non-member.If you're interested, you could for example follow the recent discussions over Ethnologue's pay-wall that yours truly have been an active participant in.. :).Mailing lists for descriptive linguistics and fieldwork

On this blog we're interested in cross-linguistic comparison and language-specific description. For the latter, there's a number of mailing lists for linguists and anthropologists devoted to specific families or areas. Unfortunately, there aren't any larger more general and popular mailing list for language description - at least not that we know of. If you hear of any good mailing lists like that, let us know :)!

There's the Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity's channels, but they're more focussed on language maintenance, teaching and revitalization. It's a great place, I think most linguistic fieldworkers should become members (especially if they're working on an endangered language).

Blogs

Good ol' blogs, still a great way to spread content. There's lots of linguistics blogs out there (we made a longer list here) but here are some that are more devoted to current research:

This time: how to take your search results and make the matching annotations into new separate tier(s). This is useful if you for example want to cycle through only the annotations that match a certain search query in transcription mode. This post has a longer guide, and a short guide at the end.

You can also use this guide if you want to compare several different transcriptions with each other, for example older and newer versions or if you are collaborating with different people. In that case, start from step (4).

For those who don't do a lot of transcription: ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator) is a program from TLA at MPI-Nijmegen. This program allows us to easily annotate audio and/or video files with lots of relevant data. We can use ELAN to c…

Humans Who Read Grammars

This is a blog by young linguists interested in diversity and description of the world's languages. We write posts about research and academia relevant to young linguists and sometimes also the general public.